Deborah Orr: It's not feminism, but the failure to engage with it, that has undermined marriage
In 40 years, no man has managed to write a book or make a speech that addresses the issue
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
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Bloody hell! If there's one thing we marriage-supporting members of the commenting classes have to be grateful for today, it's that the Archbishop of Canterbury didn't decide to join the other side. Even batting on Team Matrimony, let's face it, he's a liability, because he makes marriage sound so unbearably dreary. I don't want "prosaic heroism" or "moral geography". I want intimacy, jokes, shared history, enough children for a desultory game of rounders to be an eternal possibility, never, ever, having to put out the rubbish, and sex with a man who can't wince at my stretch marks because they're All His Fault.
Certainly, you can have all that and not be married, and equally, you can be married and not have any of it. But marriage, when it's working, is the finest, most rewarding, most committed human relationship on earth. Standing around intoning about what a solemn and difficult duty the whole thing is, doesn't seem to me like a call to welcoming arms. It sounds like a total turn-off.
Not that the Archbishop's Christian friends are doing so much better. Richard Kane, an activist who runs National Marriage Week, told the Telegraph yesterday that "for a long time the issue of marriage had been the fault line between Left and Right". Honestly, it almost makes one wish for Barbara Amiel to return to public life, so she can talk us gently through the right-wing libertarian view on that one.
Oh yes, I remember. It's all right for Barbara to behave just as she pleases, but the little people should face their responsibilities and knuckle under. Much the same drift as Thatcher's view, Major's view and the view of all those other stalwart campaigners for family values whose years in power, oddly, were marked by, what was it? Oh, yes, a comprehensive breakdown in those self-same "family values". Which is much the same as the view now being touted by Iain Duncan Smith, freshly inspired from actually meeting some poor people. (Shouldn't you have done that prior to your attempt to run the country, chum?)
It would be simple and somehow comforting to subscribe to the view that the breakdown of marriage was motivated by ardent political belief. Simple, because black versus white always seems so clear-cut - even though it usually means utterly bloody insoluble. Comforting, because there would at least be method in the whole thing, with couples up and down the country plotting their alternative lifestyles in order to win a political argument and working damned hard at doing so. The truth is, it's all much more chaotic and self-interested than that. There is a purely ideological element in the history of 20th century marital breakdown, and it's somewhat over-identified with feminism. But the identity-politics influence is heavily overstated, and sadly, I'm just about to overstate it again.
That's unfortunately necessary, because what's clear is that this latest flurry of ecclesiastical support for marriage is indeed politically motivated. It's all mixed up with the rather bonkers gay adoption issue that has ignited so many passions for so little gain, and alerted the Church to the fact that the Government is not its friend.
The church really ought to have been more relaxed in the first place, because it is not Christian to campaign for discrimination of any kind. Anyway, too late. Smarting at the rebuff of its attempt to gain moral primacy for the married couple, the church has decided that it is not going to let the matter drop.
But if the Church is intent on aligning itself against gays, feminists and north London lefties, then it is only storing up trouble for the future. The real spiritual challenge is working out how to inspire moral responsibility in a pluralist society, not inciting the population to divide along sectarian lines.
It's true that the rejection of marriage was an article of faith among feminists in the 1970s. But feminists rejected marriage because it demanded their subservience. Who would want to join an institution that not only disqualified one from having a decent career, but sanctified the right of a partner legally to rape and beat you? Who would want to join an institution that demanded you run the household and look after the children, but that you meekly handed over the phone when the bank manager called for the "man of the house". Marriage discriminated against women (and so did lack of marriage, which made you a "spinster"), which was why it offended so many of us.
Our ideas about marriage have changed, thanks to feminism, and the huge sacrifices women were routinely expected to make after marriage, are no longer taken for granted, or shouldn't be anyway. Marriage had evolved to make women and children into dependents, and feminism has inspired women to safeguard their autonomy, when they wish to, instead.
Lazy conservativism argues that it is this that has undermined marriage. This is a one-sided, biased, view. Even Iain Duncan Smith cannot be under the illusion that women on Glasgow housing estates, bringing up fatherless children, are living in state-sponsored poverty because they are feminists. Many different social pressures have led to today's predicament. But their precise position comes about because they are not supported by the fathers of their children, quite a huge swathe of whom are only willing to stick around if there is nothing but overwhelming benefit for them.
Feminism may have persuaded middle-class women they could manage alone better than with a man who expected his breadwinner status to confer him with God-like status in the home. But it did not persuade middle-class men to think about how they ought to redefine their expectations of marriage in response. Lots of men have worked out for themselves how to respond to the changed agenda, and they are to be applauded for it. But in 40 years, no man has managed to write a book or even make a speech that addresses this issue in a way that provides any meaningful moral or practical leadership. Feminism needs to be accommodated. Instead, it is merely defended or blamed. It remains women's business. The refusal to accept its validity and justice, and engage with feminism, is what has done the awful damage.
I'm aware I'm sounding like a man-hating ballbreaker. And that plenty of women get together with nice guys, have kids, then behave like destructive loonies who think they own their children and want to write their fathers out of their lives. But I also see that for decades the political agenda has concerned itself entirely with the question of whether single mothers should work, and how to get absent fathers to pay up. This has been the dominating concern in government of both the left and the right. For Christians to weigh in and suggest there is an ideological "fault line" is crazy. There's not a fault line - there's a vacuum. No amount of hectoring from the pulpit is going to fill it.
